 Welcome to Monet Café. Oh, I'm so glad you're here for this continuation in a series of flowers and bees. This is painting number seven and we're going to learn about painting a rainbow in soft pastel and watercolor as an under painting. Now these are all teeny weenie little two and a half by two and a half inch paintings. Should be a lot of fun. Oh, and please subscribe if you haven't. I would love to have you as part of the family. You can use whatever supplies you have for these lessons, but I'm using a piece of white pastel matte. It's an excellent pastel surface, but it also is water friendly, so you can use water. And in all of these paintings I am beginning with a watercolor under painting and I'm using my little Arteza 36 watercolor set. And I like this set. It's very convenient, but you can use what you have. The reference images for all of the nine paintings are from pmp-art.com, a great place to get free reference images. And if you'd like to recreate the grid system that I used for these nine paintings, you can find this slowed down with instructions in video number one in this series. And here you can see the actual reference image that I'm using. Now I haven't done this in any of the previous lessons in this series, but I thought I'd go ahead and jump on paint my photo where I'm getting all these reference images and show you how it works. Here's my profile. I'm Susan Jenkins and that is a much younger picture of me. I really do have to update that to be truthful. If you go to photo albums up top on my profile, once again just go to pmp-art.com. You do have to sign up. It's a free account. If you go to my photo album and you go down to page number eight. I know you couldn't see it in there. On page number eight, there's an album called Flowers. These are collections of photos I've found on the site through the years. I have some lovely photos I've selected. I love being able to just go find things I've already pre-saved so I can get to painting rather than searching for a perfect photo. Well, here's the little image here that I'll be painting from today. I'm not going to show the photographer's face in case she doesn't want me to. Her name is Linda. I'll just say that. Thank you Linda for this lovely photo. And here's what you do when you create from the photo. Now I type fast but not this fast. You make a little message under their photo and right here's where you can embed local media. You can put your image in the post. Then it will allow you to choose photos you've already put on PMP or upload from your own computer, which I have done here. So now Linda will be able to see what I've painted and you guys feel free to follow me on paint my photo. It's kind of like Facebook for reference images if you want to think of it that way. Alright, I hope that was helpful. Here we go. In the previous paintings I've talked about using different underpainting strategies and underpainting and watercolor for all of them. And in this one I'm going to use a bit of a complementary underpainting using some warmer tones because there's so much green and blues in this. So I'm going to do the ground with warmer watercolor tones but I'm going to kind of keep the sky the same because I really need to try to do this rainbow. I wasn't quite sure how I was going to do it. But my technique actually ended up working pretty well. So that's what I'm going to feature in this particular lesson in this series. Now they all begin with a little bit of a sketch. I don't always do a sketch when I begin a painting. But I thought for these little teeny paintings and the fact that I was doing a tutorial, it would be a good idea. By the way, I have a little lesson on sketching flowers. I believe it's in lesson two in this series. When these are all done, all nine paintings, I'm going to put them in a little playlist so you can find all nine of them very conveniently all together. So I'm going to speed this sketching part up in this particular lesson so we can get to the painting. Okay, now here was my strategy with this rainbow. I got a small brush. I wanted to go ahead and do a wet-on-wet underpainting to get this rainbow really translucent feeling. That's how a rainbow is actually, you know, in the sky. It's not solid color at all. It's very see-through, very translucent. So my thought process was, let's do a wet-on-wet underpainting. Let me lay in the standard order of the rainbow colors, letting them bleed into each other. And then I will gradually add pastels after I get the watercolor portion done on the top, just lightly glazing over and perhaps reinforcing the colors a little bit here and there. But I definitely wanted to keep it translucent feeling. And if you've watched many of my videos, you know, I almost never use a brush this teeny. I mean, unless I was using or trying to paint grasses or something. And this definitely called for a steady hand. I mean, my beginning stroke was pretty crazy there. But I got the general arc shape of the rainbow before applying the pastels and it ended up being okay. Pretty good in the end. You may notice here how I'm trying to steady my hand kind of on my working surface to get a better arc. And also too, because I had already applied the water, that is, again, what's going to allow these colors to kind of blend and bleed into each other because that's really what it does with a rainbow. There's no stark division between the colors. And it may look a little messy at this point. And I was kind of actually doubting myself a little bit. Like, is this idea going to even work? But in the end, it did work putting down the general translucent watercolor in a general rainbow color order and applying the pastels on top. And I made my rainbow a little bit bigger than the one in the reference photo because once again, these are a little two and a half by two and a half inch paintings. And I didn't have a brush any smaller than this. So, but if you try this, don't worry if it's not just perfect. And mostly I think getting that arc right, you know, a good arc shape will help with it. When I applied the pastel, you can see in the image, the final painting I posted, I kind of lost a little bit of the edges of my arc, but I thought it was okay. The rainbow is supposed to be subdued in this. It's not really the star of the show. It's just a feature that will bring interest to it. I think the painting would have been lovely without the rainbow, but I just want to, I've had this reference photo save for a long time and I always thought I want to challenge myself with doing a rainbow. I think I had tried one years ago when I was beginning with pastels and it was a total failure. So why I decided to do this challenge with such a small painting, I don't know, but it was a lot of fun and I hope you guys learn from it. Alright, so you've seen, I've been just working in the watercolor at this stage because this is an underpainting, it's fine if things blend and bleed into each other. It lends towards that impressionism. All this is a little roadmap underneath before you apply the pastel. If you've seen the other lessons, I give a lot of information and teaching on under paintings and why you would do one. Now, this might feel a little disjointed because the top is more of local color, meaning color that's natural to the scene and the bottom is where I'm doing what I mentioned before, choosing complementary color as the underpainting. Reason being that the scene had so much blue and green in it with the grasses and the blue flowers that if I did local color, I felt like when I applied the pastel it would look a little flat. I thought the red, you could do gold, you could do red, you could do an orange color and have kind of the same effect. Typically though, just so you know, when I do complementary under color with a landscape painting that has a lot of greens, I usually use red for the darkest value, like in the foreground, orange for middle values and yellows or lighter oranges for background values because those are kind of in order of value going from dark to light with those particular colors. That's just a general rule of thumb. I do, you know, I've actually been doing that for a while and it seems to work pretty well. So I'm kind of working, I'm sorry I put my watercolor on the opposite side of my left hand so you keep seeing me reach over to grab the watercolor. It's not quite so bad when I get to the pastel part, but I'm working around the flowers and notice I loosely sketch them in. They don't even, when I add the pastel, end up exactly where they are. That's why I continue to stress that these sketches and under paintings are kind of a general road map. More to get the big shapes, the general composition, and the emotion or energy you're trying to capture. They can be, you know, adjusted slightly as you work. And here you can see what I was mentioning about changing the color a bit as things recede into the distance. Oranges for middle foreground and in the reference photo there was like a background field that you can kind of see in my painting. It's the lighter green distant field. So again I'm just kind of getting the under painting established and the wonderful thing I've mentioned in multiple videos in this series. The wonderful thing, see the lighter value there, more of a yellow. The wonderful thing about this pastel map surface is that it works great for watercolor and pastel. So once I'm done with this watercolor I'm ready to paint. I don't have to do anything to the surface to get the pastel to adhere. And now it sort of looks like a mess but it does come together. I'm choosing some colors for the sky. Look how big these pastels look compared to this little two and a half by two and a half inch surface. I do find one thing that's helpful with small painting is it forces you to stay loose. I mean you can't get so detailed because the pastels are so big, you know, and I think it's just a lesson in looseness. Also you can finish them rather quickly and sometimes I find you don't take them quite so seriously. I end up having more fun with these little pieces so it's really a great experience for me. I like tiny painting and I'm using the same basic rule that the sky is darker in the upper heavens and gradually getting lighter as it gets down to the horizon line. It's also typically cooler in the heavens and it gets warmer down as you get to the horizon line. That doesn't mean you can't blend some of it together like I'm doing here with a warmer blue. Warmer blues are basically like teals and turquoise colors. So I'm just kind of working the sky and then I'm going to gradually start layering some of these blues very lightly over the rainbow. But first I'm going to do a little blending with my handy dandy chamois cloth blending technique. My last video upload was actually a lesson in showing how I use this to blend clouds and it works quite well on the pastel matte surface. It works also on the homemade surfaces that I make but the chamois cloth doesn't work as well on UART paper. It's a little bit too gritty so if you're working with a surface that's a bit more gritty I would recommend using pipe foam insulation or even a paper towel. Now here's where I'm using a pastel to, did you see how lightly layered the pastel and so lightly and now I'm using the chamois cloth to kind of blend over it. Now I did this in stages because once again this was kind of a new strategy for me and I wasn't quite sure what to expect. This is a softy. I think this is a Terry Ludwig pastel and so I'm just ever so lightly glazing over this rainbow. Once again I want to push this rainbow back. It shouldn't be feeling like it's in the foreground and it shouldn't be feeling solid. We want it to be pale, translucent and colors just barely there. So light little applications of pastel and then blending. So if you're going to give this a try that's what I recommend and I have to say oh my goodness my patrons from my Patreon page many of them have been following along with all of these paintings I've uploaded thus far and submitting their work to our homework album. It's an album where they share their lessons or their results from my lessons and it just oh my goodness blesses my heart so much to see what you guys are doing. Artist of every level we've got some brand new newbie beginners that even sometimes get a little timid about posting their work but when they do they realize we're just all part of a family and everybody's learning. It doesn't matter how much you know or how little you know it's just fun to to do this together and we all learn from each other. I know I'm sort of at the helm with this because of the YouTube channel and everything but I I actually feel as much a part of the group as the person who started the group so I hope that makes sense but I just love our Patreon family. I love our YouTube family here too. I really have enjoyed the relationships I've built even though you know right now we're I don't know getting close to 45,000 subscribers here on this channel. Oh I'm so sorry I get my hair in the way sometimes but I have come to know many of you from your comments and it's just such a blessing you know it's a beautiful thing. I really really love what we have here in Monet Café. I've kept all of this rainbow portion real time so because that was a focus really of this lesson was to demonstrate my really kind of my first time since I've been painting a while trying to do a rainbow and I'm not quite sure why I have the personality I do to just continue to take on challenges. I don't know if that's a good thing or a bad thing but I recently took on the challenge to paint a dragonfly using a set of iridescent pastels made by Mount Vision. I hadn't used this set very much and it was so wonderful to do the dragonfly's wings. That's coming soon and similar to this lesson it will have real time for the main focus of the lesson which was these beautiful iridescent dragonfly wings. Oh I was excited about that one didn't know if I could pull it off but I think it worked pretty well. So that one's coming. Oh I've got quite a few lessons of paintings I've done recently. I just it's hard to find time to paint and do all the video editing so lots of great things coming to Monet Café and to my patrons on my Patreon page. So now let's pick out some pastels. I'm going to quickly kind of try to give you a rundown of some of my choices. Those big chunky ones in the front those are Diane Townsend greens that's a Terry Ludwig blue. The round ones most of the round or long ones you see here are Sennelier pastels. I love those pastels. My darkest darks are going to be those background trees there. You see the dark there I think that's just a dark green and I'm going to use that dark green along also in the foreground there and that dark kind of purpley color. Some of the purples will be in the foreground. Those are all kind of the flower colors too those purples and blues and I believe they're from the Sennelier Paris set. I love that set. Alright so the centers of the little flowers are going to be those oranges and yellows and here we go. Notice how dark this looks when you first put it on. It makes for a really nice dark. It looks black but it's only because it only has light to contrast with. The paper is everything is pretty light because watercolor dries very lightly but value and color is relative. I talk about this a lot in my videos. I've actually done some videos giving some neat little illusions showing how a value can look dark for a while until you put something darker next to it and all of a sudden it doesn't look as dark as anymore. It's really really kind of a neat little illusion lesson and strategy that we can learn and we get better at that the more we paint. So once again speeding this up only slightly adding some music and I've been saying this in most of my recent videos. I love to see your work. Of course I get to see my patrons work because they share it in our group on our different platforms in the homework album but if you're on Monet Cafe and if you are part of our Monet Cafe art group on Facebook it's a group on Facebook. Anybody can become part of the group. There's just a few questions you have to answer but just look for Monet Cafe Art Group on Facebook. And if you paint from any of the lessons on the YouTube channel just tag me. On Facebook my screen name or page name is the art of Susan Jenkins and if you share on Instagram which a lot of you have been doing lately. I always forget to talk about my Instagram page but I'm trying to build that up so if you haven't followed me yet on Instagram it's at Susan Jenkins Artist so follow and tag me if you share a painting. I've been really enjoying seeing your work on there. Oh and I've recently had some of you asking how to become a patron. It's super easy. It's just the website patreon.com slash Susan Jenkins. It's only five dollars a month. What that does is supports this channel. Often I need new equipment. I need a new speaker right now. I actually need an easel that doesn't wiggle as much. Little things like that. You guys have helped me. My patrons have helped me buy my computer. Other camera equipment. Things that just make the channel better. So many people become a patron just to support the Monet Café channel. But if you become a patron you also get extra content. You get more real-time footage. We interact more. You get to share your work. I have contest and art supply prizes for the winners and just lots of fun. So join the family if you like. But there's always free content here on Monet Café as well. Okay guys enjoy the music. I'm going to be back and give a little more commentary so don't go away. And here I'm getting to the final stages. Trying to keep things fresh. And if you hear a strange sound in the background my dog Jackson is literally laying on the floor and he's snoring. All right time to add these cute little bees. I do have a little bit more on the bee strategy for painting these teeny little guys. And it might be lesson three. But once again all of these as a series when it gets to be the full nine paintings. Each one has commentary that hopefully will help you with many of the different elements of the paintings. So if you watch all of them I'm sure you'll learn a lot. And so here I'm just kind of choosing where to put the bees. And I'm not sure why I decided to put bees in all of these but I think they were just fun. And all of these nine paintings were fun. They were a little bit more exploratory and relaxing. So and I do think a lot of my patrons are enjoying them. See how I just put that teeny weeny little orange band on the back. Kind of the middle section of the bee. And it just gives that little indication that it's a bee. Now because the centers of the flowers were yellow they're kind of competing a bit with the yellow of the bees. Adding the wings and now using some harder new pastels. These are made by Prismacolor. They're great for grasses but notice when I add the grass is how I kind of skip along. I'm changing the pressure. Sometimes I kind of roll or turn the pastel. I'm giving them a sense of randomness but not too much randomness. And not too many. You don't need too many. You do want to sort of put them where they will be compositionally pleasing. And here's the final. These were just joyous for me. I think I just needed these bright paintings. So I hope you enjoyed. I hope you'll share and tag me if you do. And now it's time to clean up and get ready for the next one. Number eight in the series coming soon. Alright guys happy painting and you know I'll be back soon.